'Nifty' new features flagged up by one of the social network's engineers

Twitter is launching a raft of new features that could rival the services offered by third-party applications, according to a tweet from one of the social network’s engineers.

Alex Payne said “If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)” Twitter currently gets the majority of its traffic through third-party applications that are built around its open-source code, rather than directly through twitter.com.

That means that the company itself has difficulties accessing advertising revenue that may be derived from its data; any move to encourage people to use Twitter’s own applications would be likely to address that.

Developers, however, are likely to be worried by a move that threatens to undermine a range of successful apps such as Seesmic Desktop, Echofon and Tweetdeck.

Subsequently, Payne has been eager to point out that the features are based on the same data that is available to all developers, so Twitter is simply developing its own services rather than stymieing others.

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The company has confirmed, for instance, that geolocation is key to the adverts that it will launch soon, and the option is already available in the company’s API. That means Twitter clients can already use it, even though Twitter.com does not yet do so itself. Future developments look set to address that.